Recently there has been a deluge of headlines about the environmental impact of mining bitcoin. Nearly every article, tweet, video, etc, cites Digiconomist[1] and/or Cambridge[2] as their primary evidence and says some version(s) of the following statements;
“Bitcoin consumes more electricity than Argentina/Kazakhstan[3].”
“Bitcoin’s electricity consumption as a country ranks in the top 30 globally[4].”
Comparing Bitcoin to countries and ranking them does a great job of making people feel that Bitcoin is not only one of the leading sources of emissions already, but is truly an outsized problem compared to the nearly 200 countries on the planet.
This comparison is almost always combined with the universal knowledge of Bitcoin’s historical and exponential price-performance leaving the reader with a powerful and unmistakable impression, i.e., that if Bitcoin was to be left unregulated it would ruin the planet with its exponential growth. A sentiment [5]many authors[6] are happy[7] to state [8]explicitly.[9]
There is plenty to say about the methodology and the limitations of these models (and will be the subject of a later piece). However, taking their own data at full value, the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining is completely immaterial.
Comparing the annual emissions output from Digiconomist with CO2 Emissions data from Our World In Data[10], we find that Bitcoin’s global share of emissions of approximately 47 million tons of CO2 is only about 0.13% of the global annual total out of roughly 37 billion tons today. This is the same data point as used above but contextualized as any global problem should be, within the context of the whole world. As such it paints a radically different image.
It is important to
